Foreign Affairs Committee on Feb. 9th, 2017

[The Chair (Hon. Robert Nault (Kenora, Lib.)), Liberal, Bob Nault]

Colleagues, we'll get started.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we will have a briefing by Global Partnership for Education.

We have the pleasure and the honour of having Julia Gillard and her colleague Karen Mundy here this morning. I think we'll have the presentation by Ms. Gillard, and then we'll go into questions and answers and have a very broad discussion about the work of the Global Partnership for Education.

It's our pleasure to host you both this morning.

We'll do this in about an hour, roughly, and then we'll go into other business and let Ms. Gillard and her colleague get on with their day. I think it's about eight o'clock at night in Australia, so they're still awake and hanging in there. That's always a good thing.

On behalf of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development of Parliament, welcome.

[Julia Gillard, Chair of the Board, Global Partnership for Education]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

We're looking forward to your presentation, so I'll turn the floor over to you.

[Julia Gillard]

Thank you very much.

Honourable chair and members of the standing committee, thank you very much for having us here today.

I'm here in my capacity as chair of the board of the Global Partnership for Education. I want to take a few minutes to tell you about the work of GPE, the Global Partnership, and how it fits into the broader landscape of international co-operation.

I will then turn to Dr. Karen Mundy, a Canadian, not an Australian, who is with me as chief technical officer, and who is going to outline some of the interim results of our new strategic plan. I'm looking forward to the discussion that will follow.

The Global Partnership for Education is the only multilateral partnership and funding mechanism exclusively dedicated to education in the world's poorest countries. Our partnership includes 65 developing country partners and over 20 donor countries, multilateral agencies, civil society, teachers, and the private sector.

Our work is dedicated to expanding inclusive, equitable, quality learning; to strengthening education systems; and to promoting government leadership and donor harmonization. We do this at the country level by locking together better sector planning, improved policy dialogue and mutual accountability, and offering results-based financing.

The Global Partnership supports research and analysis into the unique educational contexts of our partner countries. We then provide critical financing for the development and implementation of comprehensive education sector plans, plans that are endorsed by all partners.

GPE is also the largest financier of civil society advocacy in the education sector as part of our commitment to inclusive, evidence-based policy dialogue. GPE disburses approximately $500 million U.S. per year, with 50% of this going to fragile and conflict-affected countries.

We very much value our partnership with the Canadian government, which was one of the architects of our precursor, the fast-track initiative. Canada has been a core donor since 2002. We thank you for that.

Canada continues to play an active role on our board and technical committees, and has contributed $147 million to GPE to date, with another $45.5 million committed. I would also like to recognize and thank Canada for offering to host our June board meeting this year, the first one ever held in Canada.

Outcomes in education can have a dramatic impact on progress in achieving all of the sustainable development goals. According to UNESCO, 171 million people could be lifted out of poverty if all students in low-income countries left school with basic reading skills. Investments in girls' education can reduce child marriage and maternal and infant mortality and increase the health and economic situation of families. We know that a child born to a mother who can read has a 50% greater chance of living past the age of five, a quite staggering statistic.

Despite the central importance of education as a human right and a driver of other rights, 121 million children and adolescents are out of school. Most of them are girls and children living in fragile and conflict-affected states. Seventy-five per cent of refugee youth are out of school.

A full cycle of education in a developing country costs $1.18 a day per child, yet global resources have fallen. Donor aid to basic education dropped by more than 14% between 2010 and 2014, even as development aid overall increased by 8%.

I have been proud to serve as a commissioner on the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity. The recent commission report highlights that low-income countries receive less than a quarter of all education aid. These are the countries that are most in need, the countries where girls are most likely to be out of school, the countries where children are most likely to experience the effects of conflict and instability.

In order to realize the full potential of education to create a learning generation, the same education commission report shows that international financing must increase from $16 billion per year today to $89 billion per year by 2030.

We are at a pivotal moment for everything the Global Partnership for Education stands for and for what we can accomplish. I'm very optimistic. The past 18 months have been nothing short of a quantum shift towards the emergence of a new global consensus that education must take centre stage in the efforts of the world to achieve the sustainable development goals. This is education's moment, and GPE is poised to be one of the primary implementation agencies for SDG 4 to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

I would now like to invite Dr. Karen Mundy to discuss GPE's strategic plan and some of our key interim results.

[Dr. Karen Mundy, Chief Technical Officer, Global Partnership for Education]

Thank you, Julia.

Thank you to the chair and the committee. It's a real honour to be here today to speak with you about the Global Partnership for Education.

Last year GPE launched its new strategic plan that will see our partnership through to 2020. This strategic plan, as you heard from Julia, is aligned to SDG 4, the delivery of equitable and quality learning for all children and youth.

Our partnership is influenced by a number of guiding principles that place development effectiveness, mutual accountability, inclusiveness, and a focus on results at its centre and at the core of all we do. We are working to pursue these strategic goals and to measure our results against our objectives. Our strategic goals are improved and more equitable student learning outcomes through quality teaching and learning. We will measure our results in this area.

Second, we hope to increase equity, gender equality, and inclusion for a full cycle of quality education, targeting the poorest and most marginalized, including children in conflict-affected contexts.

Third, we aim to support educational systems to become both effective and efficient. This last November I presented our partnership's interim results to our board, and a full set of results will be presented in June of this year. As can be expected, the results show areas where we have both surpassed our targets and areas for increased attention. I'll highlight a few of these.

An additional 9.3 million girls are now in school across our partnership, due in part to GPE's support. Despite that, we know that we have equity concerns across the partnership, and this continues to be a core focus for our work.

I am very grateful to Canada for supporting GPE through gender institutional analysis to develop a gender equality strategy. We have now invested approximately $1.5 billion in our active grants to help improve gender equality across the partnership.

We are excited this year to be working with Plan Canada and other partners to introduce an approach to gender responsiveness in sector planning that highlights the importance of governments costing gender responsiveness in their schools and in their school system.

We are very pleased to see an ongoing rise in the rates of lower secondary school completion across our partnership. However, we note that in many of the poorest countries, primary completion rates are stagnating at around 80%, and this is of growing concern.

Half of GPE's disbursements go to fragile and conflict-affected countries in the partnership. As you know, about a third of the children who are out of school in the world live in a conflicted-affected context. For GPE, 63% of all refugee children live within the geographies of our 65 counties, so it's an important focus for us.

We have invested $2.2 billion in conflict-affected countries, including in Haiti, Mali, Central African Republic, Yemen, and Chad. Despite incredible barriers, the primary completion rate in these settings has risen substantially, from about 55% of all children completing primary school to 68%.

We have exceeded our milestone in relation to pupil-teacher ratios. As you know, the core of an education is a good teacher. In our partner countries, 29% of classrooms now have a pupil-to-teacher ratio of 40:1 or less. That's up from 25% only a year ago. We think this is an amazing result.

One of our most important results and areas of focus is in leveraging strong domestic financing for education in the partner countries. Every dollar that GPE invests should leverage improved concentration and focus from governments on improving their education systems. We know that to achieve SDG 4, low- and middle-income countries would have to nearly triple their spending on education.

The global standard for domestic financing of education is that governments allocate between 15% and 20% of their total public expenditures to education, with a particular focus on basic education. This is a requirement for the receipt of GPE funding. We have seen domestic financing improve across our partnership. Additionally, up to 30% of our grants are delivered as a results-based tranche. That is to say that governments must produce results in equity and learning, and show efficiencies in their system in order to receive that 30%.

As Julia mentioned, GPE invests in civil society and in multi-stakeholder accountability systems at the country level. We routinely support countries to have a sector review, a review of their education sector that brings all stakeholders to the table and at which there is careful tracking of results.

Since 2002, public expenditure on education in GPE partner countries has increased at a higher rate than in non-GPE partner countries; 72% of our partner countries increased public expenditure or maintained spending above 20% between 2014 and 2015, and 22 GPE countries allocated more than 20% of their budget to education. This is a very strong result for us.

We are committed to achieving real results in learning outcomes for all children through our focus on systems building, our focus on equity, and our focus on quality learning for all children. We welcome the ongoing partnership with the Government of Canada to achieve these results.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you very much for that presentation. Global Partnership for Education is a very important institution, and we're very proud as Canadians to be actively involved in it.

Colleagues, I think we'll go right into questions.

I'll start with Mr. Allison.

[Dean Allison, Conservative, Niagara West, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Ms. Gillard, for coming to committee, and Dr. Mundy as well. I enjoyed the conversations we had last night at the event.

I have three questions for you, so I'll just get right into it.

There are a lot of great organizations. We have Gavi, the Global Fund, and all these things. Why GPE? In terms of return on investment—you did touch on this in your opening remarks—why you guys as an organization?

Second, how are you different from the other organizations that are providing education in terms of how you provide?

The third question, which sort of ties back into the first question, is about donor fatigue. What are your greatest challenges as you move forward, with other governments or with what's going on in the development community?

[Julia Gillard]

I'm very happy to answer those questions, and I'll do that as quickly as I can.

On the choices, we would bring before you the increasing evidence that we can't achieve what we want to achieve in areas like health unless we also focus on education. Indeed, GPE has been working very strongly with the Global Fund and with Gavi, because there is a recognition that what they want to achieve in health will be held back unless there is education.

For example, the evidence is very clear that if we can keep adolescent girls in school, it dramatically reduces their risks of getting HIV/AIDS. Because people's lives are joined up, the services that they need have to be joined up as well. We won't acquit the outcomes we want in health, climate change, or peace and security unless we are also focusing on education.

In terms of our comparative advantage, it is that we focus on whole school systems. Many people are doing wonderful things, innovative things, that are showing progress, but to actually take those things and make them impact the lives of millions of children, then they have to have an effect across the whole school system. We know that from our own countries. There may be schools in Canada, five or 10 of them, that have a wonderful new approach to literacy or numeracy. That's only going to affect the lives of millions of children in Canada if ultimately it's shared through a whole province, and then the province shares it with its neighbours and it goes across all of your schools. That's what we do, the whole school systems.

On donor fatigue, we recognize that this is not an easy age for government and budget priorities, and that's true around the world. However, we think that in a world where there is some increasing of donor aid—and the statistic we've given you is an 8% increase—it is truly tragic to see education's share going backwards, so we would advocate for both an increasing share for education and greater government investment in foreign aid.

The statistics that Karen gave you on domestic resource mobilization are very important. At the end of the day, most of the money for schooling in developing countries is going to come from developing countries themselves, which is why a key effectiveness in our model is the leverage of international aid resources for more domestic resources.

[Dean Allison, Conservative, Niagara West, ON]

Great. As a follow-up to that, how do you choose your countries? I'm assuming they contact you and say they'd like to do some more...and it's very much like the Global Fund, right? We'll only partner with countries that are prepared to step up and do their fair share.

I'm assuming that's a similar model to what you guys are looking at.

[Julia Gillard]

We have a model of eligibility that is based on the country's income band, so we cover low-income countries and lower middle-income countries. We also have eligibility for grants that is factored off the country's income band and also its school outcomes. That used to be factored off the millennium development goal of universal access to primary school. Now we've lifted ambition, because the sustainable development agenda is a bigger one, and it's looking at secondary school too.

So yes, countries do contact us, but when you look at that low-income and lower middle-income band, we've got very high coverage, and the partnership has grown in recent years, so clearly, countries do think that the model is an effective one for change.

[Dean Allison, Conservative, Niagara West, ON]

All right.

I have one last quick question: is there life after politics?

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Julia Gillard]

Well, I suppose I'll let you watch me today at the committee, and you can make the conclusion after that. You can judge.

[Dean Allison, Conservative, Niagara West, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

We'll go to Mr. Fragiskatos, please.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for being here today.

For me it's a very interesting meeting because I've a huge interest in literacy, especially child literacy. The social, cognitive, and emotional development of children is, as you know, so determinative in terms of their future growth and development as human beings. As well, 80% of the child's brain is fully developed by age three. Yet the focus of the international community, states themselves, on pre-primary education, the kind of education that focuses on developing the child prior to elementary school, prior to kindergarten, through play and basic tasks that are intended to develop cognition, has been traditionally lacking in terms of funding. I wonder if you could speak to whether or not you're focused on pre-primary education.

[Julia Gillard]

Perhaps I can invite our chief technical officer, Karen Mundy, to talk to that. We do have a new initiative in early childhood development that she's been overseeing for GPE.

[Dr. Karen Mundy]

You're absolutely correct. We have great neurological research now that shows us that the hot area for brain development is in the first three years.

I want to make a bit of a radical case to you about the importance of upper years of education for that early development. When women are literate, they are able to stimulate their children in those early three years. They are able to access health services, to provide nutrition, and to earn income for their families in ways that support the zero-to-three-year age set. I would say that there's perhaps more value in the dollar spent on a girl's education than almost any other input into the early development of children, so that's GPE's focus.

We do work in the pre-primary, three-to-six-year age range. I want to remind everybody that every year of a child's life is important, and that many children in those years, three to six, fall off the staircase of the educational ladder. It's very important that we address their needs, particularly for children who come from very poor or marginalized contexts. They achieve much better results and learning outcomes in primary and secondary school if they're had that pre-primary learning.

That's really the focus of our work. Again, we don't dispute the importance of that zero-to-three age set and how significant the outcomes later in life are to the investments made at that period, but we would argue that the investment in literate young women is a significant input into that early development.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

I agree completely that focusing on a young woman's education is important. I just wanted to know whether there was a focus on pre-primary education. Thank you very much for touching on that.

The connection between lack of economic development and conflict and even wars is well understood. Less focused on, though, is the connection between a lack of educational opportunity in societies and conflict—again, conflict that tends towards war. Could you talk about that connection? I think when we think about the causes of conflict in societies, conflict that manifests in war, we forget about the importance of a lack of education.

[Julia Gillard]

There is very good evidence that rising literacy rates, rising educational levels, are actually protective factors against conflict. That proposition has been statistically proven, but it's not as simple as just saying there needs to be education. Of course, we have seen the phenomenon around the world where education systems have been effective, but people have graduated from school into economies that offer them no opportunities and no hope. Disillusioned youth can then end up being a source of conflict in those societies. Education, however, is a protective factor against conflict and violence. There is of course a complex relationship between education and counter-radicalization work. Experts in the area point out that some of the most known terrorists in our world were actually highly educated people, including, for example, those who conceptualized 9/11.

So it's not only about the delivery of education, it's also about the content of education, the world view it gives people and the ability it gives them to think through their own actions and consequences.

One thing that GPE has seen happen in our partner countries, and the GPE's planning and grants-based processes have made a difference to, is the work for, I would say, from our part of the world, is the work for madrasah schools. I know that different terminology is used elsewhere. We think that bringing madrasah schools into the mainstream of the education system and ensuring that they're registered in teaching the national curriculum or the regular curriculum is also important for trying to encourage protective factors against long-term conflict and violence.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Yesterday in the Ottawa Citizen, I read a piece that you penned. You talked about Khadija in Tanzania. I think she was about 12 years old when she was forced to marry. She didn't have the opportunity to attend school, but is now raising a child who is in school and doing very well, apparently. That's a great success story.

Can you talk about how you track those kinds of success stories in general? How are you measuring results, basically? What's the basic methodology behind that?

[Dr. Karen Mundy]

We are measuring results for girls across our partnership. We help governments to invest in good data, good systems for monitoring data, and to ensure that they are tracking children both in school and out of school. So in our results framework, on an annual basis, we roll up the data from the countries so that we can give you a statistic like the one I presented earlier on the 9.3 million girls across the partnership who are in school today, who might not otherwise have been without our partnership's efforts.

I'd like to pass it back to Julia, because nothing speaks to the public better than stories of young individuals who have achieved success in their lives because of the investments in education.

Julia.

[Julia Gillard]

Shortly before coming here, I was in Malawi, where GPE funds are being used for school construction, for teacher training, for the provision of financial support for the most marginalized to get to school, and for assisting mothers clubs. Malawi is a very poor country, with very low rights of girls getting through to the end of secondary school. Through meeting with one of these mothers clubs and going to a village, we met a 14-year-old girl with a one-month-old baby. The work of the mothers club is to try to help these girls get back into schooling by helping them with the care of the child and by trying to inculcate a set of values and aspirations to get them to the end of schooling.

We think that kind of on-the-ground work is really important, and we do seek to resource it. GPE also collaborates with the organization Girls Not Brides, and they seek to persuade governments to legislate. In many countries there aren't the marriage laws that Canada has and Australia has that define minimum marriage ages, so there's a regulation question, but apart from a regulation question, there's a dynamic relationship between schooling and early marriage. The evidence is very clear that if we can keep a girl in secondary school, her likelihood of marrying very young is dramatically reduced.

We need to be ensuring that the schools are there for the girls to go to, whilst organizations like Girls Not Brides and active organizations on the ground are encouraging families to think about alternatives to early marriage and keeping their girls in school.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you, Mr. Fragiskatos.

I'll go to Madame Laverdière.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank the witnesses for being here and, above all, for the fantastic work they're doing.

It's often said in the real estate industry that location is fundamental. Location, location, location. I think that, when it comes to development, even when we talk about security and stability, the fundamental thing is education, education, education. Once again, congratulations on all the work you are doing.

That said, this work requires major funding. You talked a bit about it in your presentation. Do you foresee that the Global Partnership for Education will face funding difficulties or challenges?

Thank you.